McVoy Strikes Back

cranos writes "Fast on the heels of his previous article claiming the kernel is at risk of Bad Things over the BitKeeper fuss, Daniel Lyons has released a new article where Larry McVoy attacks the Open Source movement as non-innovative and dependent on the kindness of corporations. The following quote says it all: 'The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.'"

But....

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats just like your opinion man...

Bashing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new..."

So why is Larry bashing Microsoft?

Re:I think it's true...

[gowen]

I mean honestly, the OSS community has not treated him with any respect, despite the fact that he's a good friend of Linus

That would be a pretty stupid reason for giving someone respect. Innocence By Association is just as stupid as Guilt By Association.

Maybe, just maybe, he's an innovator who is looking to make a living off of innovating

Cool, good luck to him. I'd be interested to find out how being as big an asshole as his worst critics, and taking every opportunity to demean the work of other programmers helps him out here.

I'd also have liked it if he'd been honest enough to say "I'm an innovator, and I encourage Linux developers to use BitKeeper in order to boost their productivity and my business profile. But please bear in mind I reserve the right to take it continually change the licence conditions, and then take it away completely on a whim, and then give interviews slagging off Open Source at every opportunity."

At least Linus and Bill Gates are relatively honest about their motivation being World Domination.

A little bit of honesty goes a long way.

Re:Non-innovative?

[capt.Hij]

Okay... So besides

internet browsers,
web servers,
perl,
mail,
spam filtering,
open protocols like tc/pip,
hell, the web as we know it,
and ssl,

what has open source done for us? Nothing!

</Pythonesque>

Strong AI

[vhold]

An AI strong enough to replace non-trivial support will probably require a pyschologist from time to time.

Luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time.

Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello pugnatious

Formatting just called. It said if you would just cut down on the enter key and look around, you might notice that HTML word-wraps for you.

Re:Strong AI

[ded_guy]

How do you feel about luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time?

Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?

[E_elven]

Apparently some people also manufacture delusions.

True, true

[thomasj]

Everybody knows that EMACS is just a rip-off of edlin, just with other keybindings.

Re:wouldn't need to

[thinkfat]

Consider your comment here ignored.

Wow. This is truely the most elaborate way of ignoring a slashdot comment I've ever seen.

:-)